The present and the future

29 October 2017

After Ferrari’s debacle, he did what everyone expected him to do and that is to win the 2017 World championship Title before the Abu Dhabi epilogue if doable. Lewis Hamilton took home a well deserved crown for the fourth time in his career, cementing a series of outstanding results and dominance and fighting off a very serious attempt by Vettel to destroy his pre-season plans.

My blog today, however, is not to celebrate the gestures of the Mercedes superstar, but to look a little further into the future which is perhaps suggesting that another superstar is born. And I am talking about SuperMax Verstappen who did win the Mexican Grand Prix in a more than convincing fashion. Great start, great late braking into the first corner and bigger balls than anyone else in the field, this is how the dutchman mixed his cocktail for success. Mega performance yes but again, in my blog today, I do not want to celebrate the talent of the young Red Bull driver, there will be plenty of other occasions to do so.

What I really want to celebrate and congratulate, is the “system” who brought Verstappen to be acclaimed as the future super champion of the world. An accurate strategy, a pin-pointed investment and some hard gambling, this is the winning recipe of Helmut Marko, a man with a vision.

Sure, the boy was a mega driver in his early days, and I can say that coz I was there at his race debut in an open wheeler when he was only sixteen. And I could see the immense talent and those late braking skills which placed him a cut above the rest. But I insist: without a genial support by the Red Bull program and the hard decisions by its mentor and inventor, Max would just be one of the boys on the grid. If the present is Hamilton and the future is Verstappen, for sure the magician is Marko.